breve
Definition, pronunciation, etymology, and usage for the English word. Free spelling reference powered by Wiktionary.
Letters
5 characters
Language
English
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Detailed reference entry for the English word "breve", 5-letters, with pronunciation in International Phonetic Alphabet notation, etymology traced through Germanic and Romance roots where applicable, common misspelling variants catalogued from Hunspell error dictionaries, and usage frequency ranked against the top 100,000 English words in the Wordfreq corpus. PlainSpell covers English, Spanish, Portuguese, French, and German spelling with confusable-pair detection that highlights visually and phonetically similar words. This entry for "breve" includes synonyms, antonyms, homophones, and cross-language translation pointers sourced from Wiktionary via the kaikki.org extract. Whether you are verifying the correct spelling of "breve" for academic writing, checking homophone confusion, or exploring etymological origins, this page provides a citation-backed, free reference that requires no sign-up.
breve is aEnglishnoun. It means: A semicircular diacritical mark (˘) placed above a vowel, commonly used to mark its quantity as short. Pronounced /bɹiːv/.
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Browse all word comparisons →| Property | Value |
|---|---|
| Headword | breve |
| Language | English |
| Part of speech | Noun |
| IPA | /bɹiːv/ |
| Letters | 5 |
| Frequency rank | #83,075 |
| Misspellings tracked | 0 |
| Confusable pairs | 0 |
| Source | Wiktionary (kaikki.org) |
Frequency rank visualization
Spelling & Dictionary Insight
The English entry for breve is 5 letters long, classified as anoun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /bɹiːv/. Corpus data places it at rank #83,075 in overall English word frequency, marking it as uncommon enough that many writers pause before typing it.Wiktionary records 4 distinct senses for this headword, so context determines which meaning a reader should apply.
No frequent misspelling variants are recorded for breve in our index, suggesting the orthography either follows predictable English patterns or the word is uncommon enough that typo corpora lack signal.It is not paired with a close-neighbour confusable in our dataset, which tends to mean the word is visually distinctive enough to stand on its own.
Etymologically, the entry records: From Middle English breve, variant of bref, from Old French brieve, breve (feminine form of brief, bref), from Latin brevis (“short”). Root origin matters for spelling because borrowed morphemes (Greek, Latin, Old French, Old English) carry their source-language orthographic conventions into modern English, which is why historical etymology is often the cleanest predictor of whether a cluster like "-ough", "-eau", or "-tion" will appear. For readers arriving here from a spelling check, the authoritative guidance is: the correct English form is breve, spelled B-R-E-V-E, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.
Definition
- 1A semicircular diacritical mark (˘) placed above a vowel, commonly used to mark its quantity as short.
- 2A double whole note; a note twice as long as a semibreve.
- 3Any writ or precept under seal, issued out of any court.
- 4A pitta, all of which have more or less short tails.
Etymology
From Middle English breve, variant of bref, from Old French brieve, breve (feminine form of brief, bref), from Latin brevis (“short”).
This word in other languages
Frequency rank: #83,075 in English
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Nearby English words
Other entries that begin with the letter B in our English index: